Windows 8: More No-So-Good News

My Windows 8 upgrade is still on hold. If you’ve missed my previous posts, I tried upgrading via the download gizmo which at first said that I was good to go w/ Win 8 and the install process ended when it said that my PC was not compatible. I ordered a DVD but it has yet to arrive and we’re heading out the back-end of November.

Apparently, I’m not the only one with compatibility issues. A story on CNN’s MONEY site tells a rather sad tale of the frustrations one guy is experiencing trying to upgrade his relatively new Lenovo Z580 laptop. Read the story and you’ll see that he’s not the only one with this sort of frustration. Many of the users experiencing problems migrating to Windows 8 report that their systems have completely crashed because of the upgrade. Dr. Data has not been so unlucky but still . . .

Users report that their apps consistently crash under Windows 8 while others report that some of their essential device and software drivers aren’t compatible between Windows 7 and Windows 8. This means that parts of their system aren’t working now even though they once did under Windows 7. One can imagine that this sort of thing might happen with home-brew systems that have been cobbled together with odd parts or off-brand machines from less than well-known manufacturers. No, these complaints are coming from users with new – or almost so – PCs from mainstream manufacturers/vendors.

It seems that there are some parts of some PCs have no Windows 8 drivers available. In other cases, Microsoft did not pick up Windows 8 drivers from many of those manufacturers that did indeed make them available. If you can remember back to the dark days of Vista, the same thing happened with drivers in that situation. History is repeating itself. What can you expect of an OS that a majority of users have not heard about and are not really interested in?

I TOLD YOU SO

Back in the summer, Dr. Data opined that Microsoft was headed for a Vista-like debacle with Windows 8 and that was just due to the interface formally known as Metro. Redmond was able to recover from Vista with Windows 7. Can Microsoft survive another round of falling flat on its face? Is this a golden opportunity for Linux?

One other thing from this past summer’s posts about the rapidly approaching technological cliff called Windows 8; Dr. Data hinted that those holding shares in Microsoft might want to consider unloading them. That is more and more sounding like sage advice now.